By Luke Hawley My 7-year-old son, Judah, asked me last night about the meaning of the word complicated. He had just asked his older sister a question—one I didn’t hear—and she had answered by telling him that it was complicated.…

By Luke Hawley I grew up in a church with virtually no liturgical calendar. I mean, we celebrated Christmas and Easter and I remember once going to an Advent service, but that was at a different church and Advent was…

By Luke Hawley Matthew Arnold I had an undergraduate course aptly titled Novel, in which we read twelve novels over the course of the semester. The professor opened up class with Matthew Arnold’s idea of “sweetness and light”, which I…

By Luke Hawley Who cares whether or not it's true? In my head there are bath towels swaddling this stuff. Nothing else seeps through. This is from a story I love by Amy Hempel titled In the Cemetery Where Al…

By Luke Hawley Belief isn’t something that comes easy to me; I have heavy skeptic leanings. But I’m a writer, too, and one who can’t quite clamp down all the romantic bursts bubbling up in my blood. This makes Easter…

by Luke Hawley I’m going to a music festival this weekend. It’s gonna be great: hanging out on a blanket for two days, listening to fantastic bands, spending time with my family and some close friends, tent camping with an…

by Luke Hawley When I got my current gig teaching in a small town in Iowa, I thought of it primarily—maybe singularly—as a stepping stone. It was a three-semester temporary contract and I figured we could gut it out in…